but he doesn't (he agrees to make a film with a leading lady that has been chosen for him). and betty doesn't (her love burns Rita to the socket). and diane doesn't (she makes a final attempt to bind the fiber of her desire with Camilla's nebulous substance in the dual noose of an assassination cliche).

they all follow the injunction to substitute "the girl" for an unscripted life (a life which is unimaginable and yet, somehow, perversley possible--and without that possibility, there is no tragedy)

and so--I reiterate!--Betty's impossible confession of love TO Rita is just as much a suicide as the one that follows Diane's conspiracy to murder Camilla... "something bad is [, indeed,] happening", and it is all intensely felt, but no one aspect of the tragedy is any more real than any other aspect!

(yikes! I'll bet there are some typos in here!)
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Charles Reece:

Oh, Dave, you make my secular brain hurt with these religious references! I find that an odd sounding interpretation of a theological determinist, but the hell if I'm going to spend any time reading Calvin to test it out one way or the other. Anyway, I think you miss some possibilities living way over their on your egopole. A little bit of Davidson on schemata applied to the subject/object "divide": you have to be in a place of privilege to say one way or the other whether or not they can be bridged and that — like arguments for the prime mover — is going to involve you in an infinite regress. You're committing the same sin as the most rabid, old school correspondence theorist of truth by suggesting that we can't (how do you know?). So, you can either assume we can or we can't with equal authority if you want to play skeptical. I'd say you're left with pragmatism, and it's not very pragmatic to assume conversation is impossible. In fact, anyone who writes one word surely doesn't seriously hold that. And there are some good psychological reasons for thinking conversation is possible (e.g., when listing attributes to a word's meaning, subjects' listings tend to collect within certain conceptual dimensions, i.e., "family resemblances"). Now, this doesn't solve any sort of noumenal problems that philosophers might dream up, but it does suggest that, as a human community (I'd say biologically informed, as well, and there's some good evidence for this, too), we're able to live within a world that doesn't need to connect up to an Absolute for us to have some objective ground for communicating (more or less), that is, we don't have to know the Absolute to "empathize" (to use the term as loosely as possible). We deal with the given (however metaphysically ineffable) as best we can. I think the work of Lynch emblematizes this condition: real understanding comes out of the way his characters form real bonds, based on how they grapple with the unknowable, not out of recognizing that empathy is metaphysically impossible, or fundamentally unknowable. That's why Dale Cooper is the Lynchian hero par excellence: he looks at what's given, and works within the parameters of what's possible. That means giving in/being open when he doesn't have control over all the consequences. A subjectivist believes not only that you can justifiably ask any question, but that you can justifiably give any answer (subjectivism is a relativism, but not all relativisms are subjective). I don't think there's much evidence for that sort of radical indeterminism within MH or any of Lynch's films. The most tragic figures are the one's trying to control the consequences (Diane in her dream as Betty, parallel to her life as Diane, Bill Pullman in LOST HIGHWAY). Subjectivistic wish fulfillment leads to misery. Rational openness to the objective is what brings contentment (of course, the objective in Lynch's diegeses is a tad bit off from ours, but the message translates). So, it's not Diane's decision to kill Camilla per se that I'm focusing on, it's her attempt to control what she can't control whence the tragedy derives. She has no control over Adam in reality, but she attempts to control him in her dream (through her homuncular forces), thus I don't see him as a co-desirer, but as an object of her desire (her desire to control). She's the director, but not really. That's not a gaze of love between them, but, I'd wager, one of recognition. She doesn't have control over the consequences and the dream is a realization of that. I think that's what silencio is saying, stop fitting the world to your own private language, let it speak. That we can't connect to the Absolute is neither here nor there, it's more important to recognize that objective conditions fall out of subjective desires. Again, it's an interaction, and you can't have one without the other. Accepting this is rational in the Lynchian universe (and ours).